Infrastructure has been and will continue to be a debated issue as the presidential campaign evolves toward 2016. Our parents and grandparents know and witnessed a great infrastructure renaissance both during the depression and after World War II. It was the Republican President Eisenhower who led the charge in building our highways in the 1950s to move people and goods more efficiently. In the years between 1932-1960, building dams, bridges, and highways was not a polarizing issue. Quite the opposite. It was a bipartisan effort to modernize the United States and provide employment for many workers who did not have a college education. When a young and charismatic President John F. Kennedy proclaimed, "We choose to go to the moon," our confidence as a nation was never higher. We could build anything.
Now in the 21st century our structure crumbles with the same force of the edifice of cynicism that rises in our ethos. In the space of two weeks, we saw a grotesque oil spill from an outdated pipe on our Central Coast and an Amtrak train crash killing and injuring commuters who depend on rail transportation. In 2013 the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the infrastructure of the United States a grade of D+. The engineers' recommendation was a need to spend $3.6 trillion to bring America's roads and bridges and electric grid up to 21st-century standards. That $3.6 trillion could have been available had the Bush administration not entered into war with Iraq in 2003. Instead of a waste of American and Iraqi lives and trillions of dollars that our country has nothing to show for, our infrastructure could have been a model to the world as it was in the 20th century.
President Obama has implored a Republican Congress to support infrastructure bills to repair or replace our outdated and low-performing structural capacity, and to provide opportunity for those unemployed after the Great Recession to find work. As with most of the president's initiatives, the GOP has built a wall of non-cooperation.